"So little time."
"So little time."
Last Aug. 19, the Manila Economic and Cultural Office, in cooperation with the Cebu Technological University, Tourism Infrastructure and Enterprise Zone Authority under the Department of Tourism and Harbest, a private corporation that specializes in Taiwan technological innovations in agriculture, graduated 129 farmer-participants in Maomaowan, a mountain barangay of Cebu City.
The land belonged to TIEZA; the classroom and laboratories, CTU’s; the field technicians from Harbest, which is owned by Mr. Toto Barcelona, a Negrense who married a Taiwanese; the project financing from MECO.
The “graduation” was actually a vegetable harvest of okra, radish, aubergines, cucumbers, mustard, bell peppers, among others, the result of a 90-day program of livelihood training for the poor mountain barangay farmers.
In the afternoon, MECO directors visited Cebu City’s Mayor Edgardo Labella, to coordinate with his office the possibility of putting up a modest produce market in the city, which the new mayor forthwith approved, and assigned his younger brother as point person.
Eventually, as the project expands, the Department of Tourism could entice hotels and resorts in the area to tie up with the farmers as a ready market for their produce.
A flower farm is also being planned in the area, with better varieties and better technology, to supply the metro-Cebu market.
In Mount Purro in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, a similar MECO-sponsored project is being implemented among the Dumagats of Rizal. A future article will give out details.
These are small and modest steps to introduce better farm technology to our impoverished farmers.
Last week, in a meeting with the new secretary of the Department of Agriculture, who inherited a multi-agency department with a multitude of big problems, we were able to get his enthusiastic pledge for more coordinated projects to enhance farm productivity and small farmer incomes.
Of course the problems of agriculture, as well as those that loom for the economy, are quite formidable.
Palay farmers are groaning over low farm-gate prices for their produce. Urban consumers may be content that rice imports have tamed inflation, but the vagaries of the international market, with a very thin volume of tradeable rice, presents little room for extended comfort. And the National Food Authority has been rendered virtually useless, unless our economic managers can strike a delicate balance between ensuring continued domestic production and stabilizing consumer prices.
In some areas of the Cagayan Valley, a new specie of army worms is decimating palay and corn harvests, and these are our biggest suppliers of corn, the scarcity of which will impact on meat prices. As if meat is not a problem even now, with hog cholera or whatever other kind of disease having reared its dangerous head in some parts of Rizal.
Copra prices have fallen to historic lows, with little relief in sight. We should be pushing alternative coconut-based products, such as virgin coconut oil the production process for which we developed in Los Baños, but Thailand and even Sri Lanka have beaten us in the international market. We are pushing coco sugar as an alternative to cane sugar, but come to think of it, why label it as sugar, which connotes “unhealthy,” instead of perhaps—coco sweetener?
The economy is showing signs of weakening, after a “rachada” of high growth rates which we keep touting in trade fora. Agriculture has been identified as the albatross for the last five years; foreign investments have been growing quite slow compared to Vietnam’s and Indonesia’s.
And of course, the exacerbated trade war between US of A and China are high winds affecting the entire world, with the irascible and unpredictable Trump and the imperturbable Xi trading barbs along on and off negotiations. Nothing good for the entire world could come out of the protracted swordplay.
As if all these economic problems were not harbingers of impending difficult times, we get shockers such as the mercifully aborted “freedom” of convicted murderer and rapist Antonio Sanchez of Calauan; the un-aborted release of four Chinese drug lords, and the yet unconfirmed release of the group who gang-raped and murdered the Chiong-Jimenea sisters of Cebu in a grisly story that gripped the headlines in 1997.
And how many more heinous convicts, pray tell?
With the kind of penitentiary system we have, would people feel safe and secure knowing thousands of “rehabilitated” convicts are on the loose? And then, belatedly someone suggests that we recapture the ones BuCor let loose. OMG!
No wonder the President keeps saying he rues the day he decided to run for the top leadership of the benighted land.
So many big problems and so little time left.